{"id":1230,"date":"2026-07-10T14:13:01","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T14:13:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1230"},"modified":"2026-07-10T14:13:01","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T14:13:01","slug":"the-rosenberg-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1230","title":{"rendered":"The Rosenberg Boys"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For those old enough<\/span> to remember, Michael and Robby Meeropol will always be the Rosenberg boys.<\/p>\n

Read more Atlantic Trivia: France (Yay!) and Belgium (Boo!)<\/a><\/p>\n

I never knew them as such, but it\u2019s not hard to imagine what they were like, in part because there are so many pictures. In one, from June 1953, they are sitting outside the White House in shirts and ties, wool coats, and Brooklyn Dodgers caps. Six-year-old Robby holds his grandmother\u2019s hand; to his right stands a rabbi.<\/p>\n

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The boys look uncomfortable, and solemn. Their parents, Ethel and Julius, have been convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and sentenced to death. Robby and Michael are there to ask President Dwight Eisenhower to spare their lives. Michael, who is 10, has written a letter that he will hand to a White House guard: \u201cPlease let my mommy and daddy go and not let anything happen to them. If they come home Robby and I will be very happy we will thank you very much.\u201d<\/p>\n

Out of the frame, but documented in other photos from that day, are the placards that protesters carried invoking Robby and Michael, the helpless boys made symbols of what many believed was a grave injustice about to be perpetrated against their parents. (Counterprotesters, carrying signs saying FRY \u2019EM <\/span>and HANG \u2019EM<\/span>, disagreed.) Similar scenes played out around the world. After Pope Pius XII called for clemency, the Vatican\u2019s newspaper cited the \u201ctwo little innocents on whose soul and destiny the death of their parents would forever leave sinister scars.\u201d<\/p>\n

I learned the broad outlines of the events that followed\u2014the electric chair, and the orphans it left behind\u2014half a century later, on a weekend visit to the home of my parents\u2019 friends Robby and Elli in western Massachusetts. I was 8. I don\u2019t recall how the subject came up or exactly what I was told, but I remember trying to picture the electrocution, and that I couldn\u2019t sleep that night. I knew Robby mostly as the kind of adult who enjoys making bad puns and funny faces for kids\u2019 amusement. The notion that, as a kid himself, he had been orphaned by the United States government didn\u2019t seem to match his playful persona. I wondered, but didn\u2019t quite know how to ask, how anyone could go on living after something like that had happened. And how could he possibly seem so normal?<\/p>\n

I later learned more: that Robby and Michael had been adopted after the executions, taken a new last name, and all but disappeared from the public eye. They went to college and graduate school, got married, had children of their own\u2014only to reemerge as public figures in the 1970s, vowing to clear their parents\u2019 names. From then on, they\u2019d never really stopped talking about Ethel and Julius, or pressing the government for answers about its evidence and motivations for seeking their death. By the time I was old enough to observe their advocacy firsthand\u2014at a public event commemorating the executions\u2019 50th anniversary, and later in a presentation Robby gave at my high school\u2014I understood their basic posture to be one of resolute protest. Ethel and Julius, they maintained, had not been atomic spies. They had been scapegoated for their political allegiances, framed by prosecutors, and wrongfully killed.<\/p>\n

This was not, I came to understand, an uncontroversial position. One year, my family\u2019s Yom Kippur break-fast meal was very nearly derailed when my dad got into an argument with one of our guests about the Rosenbergs. Julius and Ethel, this guest insisted, were both guilty as charged, and to pretend otherwise was a pinko fantasy. The incident left me with yet more questions about my parents\u2019 friend and the complicated historical legacy he\u2019d inherited.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve lately been able to ask Robby and Michael many of these questions directly\u2014and to go beyond the abbreviated, textbook version of their family\u2019s story, deep into the countless primary and secondary sources that, for nearly 75 years, have helped shape an ever-evolving debate about what, in this case, constitutes truth, and what justice really means. The facts are messier and more resistant to facile conclusions than either side of the argument might care to acknowledge. Even now, new ones continue to emerge.<\/p>\n

Since the fall of the Soviet Union 35 years ago, government files have been declassified and grand-jury testimonies unsealed; key players have made dramatic confessions. Robby and Michael, the old men who were once such young boys, have had to make their own sense of these revelations. Not all of them have been easy to accept.<\/p>\n

In April of last year, <\/span>I spent a day with the brothers in Cold Spring, New York, where Michael and his late wife, Ann, moved in 2009. The town sits on a hill overlooking the Hudson River, and I got off the train from New York City that morning with hikers who fanned out to the nearby trails.<\/p>\n

Robby was waiting to pick me up at the station in his red Toyota; he\u2019d arrived early, as he is apt to do. On the short drive to Michael\u2019s condo, we made easy small talk. I\u2019d made clear that the article I was writing would be solely mine to shape, and they\u2019d agreed that I could ask them anything. But I knew that once I turned my recorder on, I\u2019d need to ask questions that might put me in league, in their minds, with the legions of other journalists they believed had fixated on the wrong angles, or missed the point of the Rosenberg case entirely.<\/p>\n

Before I started reporting this story, I\u2019d met Michael only in passing. We\u2019d now talked on the phone a few times, and my main takeaway was that his being a retired economics professor made a lot of sense. His tendency was to carefully (and loquaciously) argue a point, and he had limitless enthusiasm for wading into the minutiae of legal details and chronology. Robby, by his own admission, preferred to focus on more general themes. As the three of us sat talking in Michael\u2019s living room, Robby pointed out that his brother, being four years older, had spent far more time with their father than he had. Robby seemed to think of Julius more as a historical figure he happened to be related to, while Michael, on some level, still mourned the father he\u2019d lost as a 10-year-old.<\/p>\n

Julius was a co-owner of a struggling machine shop on the Lower East Side. On weekends, he would take Michael to ride the New York City subways and elevated trains for hours on end; they would stand at the very front, where they could look out at the switching tracks. Ethel stayed home with Robby. She worked hard at being a good mother\u2014she sang to her boys, read Parents\u2019<\/em> magazine, took a class in child psychology. In their small apartment near the Manhattan Bridge, the kids shared the lone bedroom while their parents slept in the living room.<\/p>\n

Listening to Michael\u2019s descriptions, you could almost forget that his early years were different from those of other postwar American kids: \u201cI\u2019d have a wooden baseball bat and a Spalding ball or a tennis ball. He\u201d\u2014Julius\u2014\u201cwould pitch it to me, and I would hit it.\u201d Michael was listening to The Lone Ranger<\/em> on the radio when, one July night in 1950, FBI agents came to the door to arrest his father.<\/p>\n

In his letters from jail and later prison, Julius tried to reassure his sons. \u201cDon\u2019t you worry,\u201d he wrote; \u201cwe\u2019ll be playing games again as soon as I can straighten out this trouble I\u2019m in.\u201d But on August 11, after Ethel appeared before the grand jury that had indicted Julius and refused to answer any questions, she, too, was arrested. Neither of them ever came home again.<\/p>\n

After his mother\u2019s arrest, Michael told an aunt that he wanted to run into the street and get killed by a car. He stopped eating. He drew endless railroad tracks, switching and merging and looping but going nowhere. When he complained to his grandmother Tessie Greenglass, with whom he and Robby were staying, she told him to send Ethel a telegram. But he didn\u2019t want to upset his mother, so he said that he was \u201chaving a nice time. I miss you very much. Love, your son, Michael.\u201d<\/p>\n

The boys were eventually sent to the Hebrew Children\u2019s Home in the Bronx, where attendants beat and ridiculed children. To Robby, it felt as if he and Michael were imprisoned, just like Ethel and Julius. He didn\u2019t understand what his parents had been accused of doing. Instead, he harbored an anxious sense that some menacing force had broken up his family\u2014and stood ready to do more damage if given an opening. He would try to avoid attracting attention, lest \u201cthey\u201d take notice and wreak more havoc. He also developed a coping mechanism that I sensed had become a lifelong habit: \u201cWhenever something was really bad,\u201d he told me, \u201cI always figured out some way to say, Oh, it\u2019s no big deal. It\u2019s not happening<\/em>. It\u2019s a form of denial, I guess.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I watched the brothers that day in Cold Spring, they struck me as, above all, brothers\u2014by turns affectionate and peeved with one another, as likely to use a childhood nickname as to sigh in exasperation. They are fluent in the vigorous conversational cadence of older Jewish men raised in mid-century New York. \u201cVerbal combat,\u201d Robby later said, was a favored family pastime. But neither of them seemed eager to undergo much emotional probing.<\/p>\n

At one point that afternoon, Michael spent a few minutes recounting the songs his parents had played for them as kids, enjoying himself as he quoted what Julius had called \u201cnonsense\u201d lyrics from \u201cOh! Susanna\u201d and other \u201ccamp songs.\u201d If not quite fully transported back in time, he appeared willing, at least, to try going there.<\/p>\n

Without meaning to, I broke the spell. As Michael began to reflect on his relationship with Ethel, and his sense that he\u2019d been a \u201cbad boy,\u201d frequently misbehaving, I tried to prompt Robby to add his own recollections from that pre-arrest period. \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d Robby said, and paused. Maybe it was too much to expect a 3-year-old to have formed clear memories. In any case, he quickly changed the subject back to their decades of advocacy work.<\/p>\n

Before I boarded <\/span>my return train to New York City, Michael reminded me to look out the window on my left. A few stops away, in Ossining, the barbed-wire fences and high turrets of Sing Sing towered over the tracks. In opting to spend his retirement near his grandkids, Michael had ended up living half an hour from the site of his parents\u2019 deaths.<\/p>\n

Robby and Michael visited their parents in prison for the first time in the summer of 1951, after more than a year apart. By then, the boys had gotten used to the Hebrew Children\u2019s Home, and then they had gotten picked up from it. Now they were staying with their \u201cBubbie,\u201d Sophie Rosenberg, who played with them and cooked foods they liked. Still, they were eager to see their parents again.<\/p>\n

Julius and Ethel were separated in prison, allowed to see each other only once a week or so. Mostly, they communicated through letters. Anxious to put the boys at ease, Julius wrote to Ethel that he planned to draw them pictures of trains, boats, and buses. \u201cHah! You can\u2019t make me jealous with your boats and trains,\u201d she replied. \u201cI have an envelope full of rare specimens collected with painstaking care by that intrepid hunter of wild insects, namely, your wife!\u201d She worried that Robby in particular \u201cmay be a little shy and strange with us.\u201d<\/p>\n

In another letter to Julius, Ethel imagined how they might explain their situation to the boys. \u201cOf course, we feel badly that we are separated from you but we also know that we are not guilty and that an injustice has been done to us by people who solved their own problems by lying about us,\u201d she wrote. \u201cIt\u2019s all right to feel any way you like about them, so long as your feelings don\u2019t give you pain and make you unhappy.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Sing Sing, the boys saw Ethel first, then Julius. Determined to prove his fearlessness, Michael asked to see the electric chair for himself. Ethel had suggested that Julius describe its effect as \u201cpainless electrocution,\u201d similar to \u201ca highly magnified electric shock that anybody might sustain.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact is both children are disturbed,\u201d Julius wrote after the visit.<\/p>\n

The executions had been set for May 1951, but the date kept getting pushed back as appeals made their way through the legal system. On subsequent visits, all four Rosenbergs were allowed to be together, and the mood of their reunions became lighter. As a family, they laughed and sang songs; sometimes, they played hangman. When Michael asked his parents if they were truly innocent, they assured him that they were.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou boys are our greatest pleasure and joy in life and we love you more than anything else in the world,\u201d Julius wrote in one letter. And indeed, it\u2019s hard to read the letters, and the various accounts of these visits, and come to any conclusion other than that Ethel and Julius loved their sons. They agonized over the details of the boys\u2019 care and cursed the government for separating them.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s also hard not to question why they didn\u2019t do more to prevent their sons from being orphaned\u2014why they chose not to take advantage of the numerous opportunities they were given to cooperate with the authorities, and to live.<\/p>\n

Ethel\u2019s younger<\/span> brother David Greenglass made a different choice. When Klaus Fuchs was arrested by the British in early 1950 for passing atomic plans to the Soviets, his testimony led American authorities to Harry Gold, a chemist. Gold in turn led them to David, who had been a machinist at Los Alamos during World War II, and his wife, Ruth.<\/p>\n

The Greenglasses quickly confessed that they had been part of a spy ring led by Julius Rosenberg, through whom they said they had shared sketches of the atomic bomb\u2019s design with the Soviets in 1945. Ruth said that Julius had told her to recruit David, and that Ethel was there and had been encouraging.<\/p>\n

The FBI was certain that Julius had more valuable information, and hoped that he would confess and name names, just as his brother- and sister-in-law had. But Julius denied everything, and refused to point a finger at anyone else. So J. Edgar Hoover decided to adopt a recommendation from a subordinate, who wrote that agents should \u201cconsider every possible means\u201d to make Julius talk\u2014including bringing charges against Ethel. Hoover wrote to the attorney general: \u201cProceeding against his wife might serve as a lever.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Greenglasses\u2019 testimony gave the government enough evidence for an arrest warrant. But like Julius, Ethel told the authorities nothing\u2014nor did her arrest have the intended effect on her husband. The trial, though, brought out new testimony from the Greenglasses, who said that Ethel hadn\u2019t just been a supportive bystander, but had typed up David\u2019s hard-to-read notes on classified atomic science. Now the death penalty seemed like a real possibility for both Rosenbergs.<\/p>\n

At the sentencing, Judge Irving R. Kaufman said that he considered the couple\u2019s actions \u201cworse than murder\u201d\u2014a crime with untold numbers of past and future victims. Russian access to the atomic bomb, Kaufman said, had \u201calready caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.\u201d Kaufman made clear that both husband and wife were to blame. \u201cJulius Rosenberg was the prime mover in this conspiracy,\u201d he said, but Ethel was a \u201cfull-fledged partner.\u201d Both therefore deserved to die.<\/p>\n

Subsequent revelations from multiple prosecutors in the case have shown that the judge didn\u2019t come to this conclusion entirely on his own. Roy Cohn, who was an assistant U.S. attorney on the case, later said that prosecutors had had clandestine phone conversations with Kaufman, \u201cespecially about whether Ethel should be sentenced to death.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Rosenbergs\u2019 co-defendant, Morton Sobell, a former classmate of Julius\u2019s at City College, also claimed total innocence. Sobell was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and sentenced to 30 years in prison (he was spared the death penalty because no evidence tied him to sharing atomic<\/em> secrets). David was sentenced to 15 years in prison and served less than 10. Ruth, who was never charged, stayed with their two young children.<\/p>\n

A few weeks before their deaths, the Rosenbergs were visited at Sing Sing by James V. Bennett, the director of the Bureau of Prisons. Bennett said he\u2019d been sent by the attorney general with an offer: If they were ready to talk, officials would recommend clemency.<\/p>\n

Ethel was outraged. \u201cI made it short and sweet,\u201d she wrote to her lawyer. \u201cI was innocent, my husband was innocent, and neither of us knew anything about espionage.\u201d What right did the government have \u201cto try to forcibly wring from us a false confession, by dangling our lives before us like bait before hapless fish! Pay the price we demand, or forfeit your lives, is that the idea?\u201d Bennett pleaded with her to change her mind.<\/p>\n

The deputy attorney general later said of Ethel, \u201cShe called our bluff.\u201d<\/p>\n

In June 1953, the <\/span>day after their 14th wedding anniversary, after several last-minute appeals\u2014including to the U.S. Supreme Court\u2014had failed, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, ages 35 and 37, had one final afternoon together, separated by wire mesh. Ethel wrote a letter to their sons that they would both sign: \u201cWe wish we might have had the tremendous joy and gratification of living our lives out with you,\u201d it said. \u201cAlways remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience. We press you close and kiss you with all our strength.\u201d<\/p>\n

The letter would have a much wider audience than just Robby and Michael, who were by then living with family friends in New Jersey. The uncertain fate of the Rosenbergs had become global news, and the couple\u2019s letters were being distributed in dozens of countries via pamphlets and newspapers. From December 1952 to June 1953, 80 rallies in support of the Rosenbergs were held in Paris alone. One French diplomat told Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that the case was \u201cthe most troublesome issue affecting relations between the United States and Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last summer, Robby, Michael, and I visited the archives at Boston University\u2019s library, where many of their parents\u2019 prison letters are housed. As we looked through the collection, Michael said that, when it comes to his mother\u2019s letters, he considers only two or three \u201creally real\u201d\u2014that is, not written for public consumption. He has returned to one of these often.<\/p>\n

Two days before the scheduled executions, Robby and Michael visited their parents for the last time. Michael left crying and screaming: \u201cOne more day to live, one more day to live!\u201d But Ethel didn\u2019t cry. Later, she tried to explain her behavior in a note she sent her sons via her lawyer. To show emotion \u201cwould have been so easy, far too easy on myself,\u201d she told them. \u201cI took the hard way instead of the easy, because I love you more than myself and because I knew you needed that love far more than I needed the relief of crying.\u201d She continued:<\/p>\n

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I know, sweethearts, an explanation of this kind cannot ever substitute for what we have been missing and for what we hope to be able to return to, nor do I intend it as any such thing. Only, as I say, we need to try to remain calm and free from panic so that we can do all we can to help one another to see this thing through!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Just after 8 p.m. on June 19, Julius followed Sing Sing\u2019s Jewish chaplain to the electric chair. As the rabbi prayed, the executioner secured the five leather straps. Before he delivered the fatal shocks, he put a leather face mask on Julius meant to prevent his eyes from popping out of his head. Julius was pronounced dead after he received three charges of electricity.<\/p>\n

The rabbi then gave Ethel a final chance to live. Did she have any names to share? She said she did not: \u201cI\u2019m innocent; I\u2019m prepared to die.\u201d She was strapped in and masked. The executioner delivered three shocks. But doctors found that the three charges had not been sufficient; Ethel\u2019s heart was still beating. It took two more jolts, and four and a half minutes total, to kill her.<\/p>\n

Michael and Robby were watching a baseball game on TV when a news flash came on the screen announcing that their parents were about to be executed. The adults sent the boys out to play ball with friends. By the time they came back in, they were orphans.<\/p>\n

I first read <\/span>Robby\u2019s memoir, An Execution in the Family<\/em>, soon after it was published, in 2004. I was 11 then, and gripped by the kid\u2019s-eye perspective of the early chapters. I retained two distinct mental images from the book. One was of the Hebrew Children\u2019s Home. The other was of a train set, which served as a partial answer to the question of how the boys could have turned out as well-adjusted as they had; there was, strange as it sounds, a happy part of this story.<\/p>\n

On Christmas Eve 1953, the boys went to a party at the home of W. E. B. Du Bois, who had advocated for clemency for Ethel and Julius. Inside the largest house the boys had ever been in was an enormous Christmas tree with a pile of presents underneath it, all for them. This was where Michael and Robby first met Anne and Abel Meeropol, who asked them that night if they wanted to move in with them. Their own two sons had been stillborn, and Anne and Abel, now in their 40s, wanted badly to be parents.<\/p>\n

By the start of 1954, Robby and Michael were living with the Meeropols in Manhattan; the couple were fun and loving, and the boys quickly began calling them Mommy and Daddy. But one night in mid-February, after Robby had gone to sleep, New York City police officers knocked on the door of the couple\u2019s apartment to demand that he and Michael be turned over immediately.<\/p>\n

Ethel and Julius\u2019s lawyer had died of a heart attack before he could legally transfer guardianship to the Meeropols. Now two child-welfare groups had obtained a court order to remove Michael and Robby from the Meeropols\u2019 home, on the grounds that living with former Communist Party members was not in the boys\u2019 best interest. Abel refused to open the door and, in Michael\u2019s telling, informed the officers that, if they wanted to take Robby and Michael, they\u2019d have to kill him first. Somehow, he and Anne were able to arrange with lawyers to keep the boys overnight.<\/p>\n

The next day, a judge ruled that Robby and Michael should be considered wards of the state and sent them to an orphanage. But the day after that, the Meeropols and Sophie Rosenberg, the boys\u2019 grandmother, appealed to the New York Supreme Court, which gave Sophie temporary custody. For the next several months, Robby lived in fear of being sent back to the orphanage. Eventually, in September 1954, he and Michael were allowed to return to the Meeropols\u2019. Recounting this turning point as we pored over the archives at Boston University, Michael began to cry. Anne later told him, he said, that she and Abel had plans to flee to the Soviet Union with the boys if they were not granted custody.<\/p>\n

Michael and Robby started using the Meeropol name almost immediately, allowing them at last to slip back into private life, and they were formally adopted in 1957. The family\u2019s Washington Heights apartment was, as Michael and Robby remember it, always full of laughter, music, and funny voices; it had room for all of their toys, including a Lionel electric train set. The boys kept huge tanks of fish and had a cat named Fuzzy Shnooky Romeo. When Robby went away to camp, Abel drew him cartoon postcards with silly, smiling animals. \u201cDaddy got us worms!\u201d the fish exclaim in one. \u201cYum! Yum! Hooray!\u201d Abel signed the postcards \u201cPop.\u201d Robby still has them.<\/p>\n

Both Abel and Anne had been public-school teachers; Abel had taught James Baldwin high-school English. Abel was also a songwriter\u2014in the 1930s, he\u2019d written the music and lyrics to \u201cStrange Fruit,\u201d a song about lynching made popular by Billie Holiday\u2014and had been successful enough that the couple could now live primarily off his royalties, in effect serving as full-time parents.<\/p>\n

Anne and Abel rarely brought up the past with Michael and Robby, but when Ethel and Julius did come up, the Meeropols reinforced their sons\u2019 impression of them as brave, principled people who had been wrongly executed. As they grew into adulthood, Michael and Robby came to treat that final letter from June 1953 as gospel: Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Read more Photos of the Week: Rabbit Beach, Puffin Census, Wild Horses<\/a><\/p>\n

In the years immediately following his parents\u2019 executions, Michael said, he didn\u2019t cry at all. But when he was 16, a work of fiction\u2014a 1947 novel by Willard Motley\u2014finally cracked the defensive shell he\u2019d developed. In his journal, he wrote:<\/p>\n

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I read the end of Knock on Any Door which describes a man\u2019s feelings as he goes to his death in the chair. It shook me, and it broke me. I realized that the two dearest people in the world to me had gone through that agony and more. They probably worried about their \u201cbabies\u201d and what would happen to them. My God was it awful. I cried and cried and cried so much. I feel terrible.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Oh to be half as courageous as those two wonderful people\u2014Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. MY GOD<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Abel saw him crying, and saw what he\u2019d been reading, and gave him a long hug.<\/p>\n

More than their childhood, <\/span>Robby and Michael wanted to talk with me about the chapter of their lives that began in the 1970s, when they chose to \u201ccome out\u201d as Rosenbergs after years of keeping quiet about who they were.<\/p>\n

One night in early 1973, Michael heard that a trial lawyer named Louis Nizer, who had not been involved in the Rosenberg case, was reading out loud from his parents\u2019 prison letters on TV. Nizer had just published a popular book about the case, The Implosion Conspiracy<\/em>, which concluded that the Rosenbergs were guilty as charged. Michael called Robby, upset. The brothers believed that they held the copyright to their parents\u2019 letters, which they saw as their sole inheritance. Why should Nizer be allowed to use them for his own biased ends?<\/p>\n

On June 19, 1973, the 20th anniversary of their parents\u2019 deaths, they filed a lawsuit. \u201cWe are strongly reaffirming our identification with and respect for our murdered parents and what they did for us both in their role as citizens as well as in their relationship with us as parents,\u201d they wrote. It wasn\u2019t long before the press showed up. \u201cAll of a sudden we were public,\u201d Robby recalled. \u201cAnd the sky didn\u2019t fall.\u201d In some ways, it was liberating to no longer be keeping such a big secret.<\/p>\n

The legal bills were expensive, and they began traveling around the country to raise money, giving speeches under the auspices of a new National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case. They planned to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the government\u2019s evidence, or lack thereof, about their parents. In 1974, Robby stood onstage at Carnegie Hall and declared, \u201cIn the next year we are going to blow the lid on this case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Touring the country, they met well-wishers who were emotional about seeing \u201cthe boys\u201d as grown men, people who cried and hugged them and hung around a little too long. Robby and Michael found this draining. Their preferred approach relied more on logic than emotion. They vowed to follow the facts. They would become experts; they would make an unimpeachable case. They wouldn\u2019t get carried away by anger or grief.<\/p>\n

Still, revisiting the letters and reading the trial transcripts for the first time forced Michael to relive the pain of his parents\u2019 deaths, he told me. Publicly, he remained composed, but in private, for a year or so, he \u201ccried, cursed, raged,\u201d struck anew by the pathos of his parents\u2019 correspondence and the could-have-beens of their complex appeals process. By the late 1970s, the brothers were exhausted by the work of being professional Rosenbergs, and starting to worry that the effort was futile. Their FOIA lawsuit had , but there was no smoking gun\u2014maybe there never would be.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, Robby and Michael told me, they wondered if there might be more to their parents\u2019 story than what was in their letters. They never questioned that Ethel and Julius had been framed as atomic spies, but could they have committed some lesser offense that had made them government targets? Yet whenever the brothers asked Morton Sobell, their parents\u2019 co-defendant, to tell them the truth, all they got was the same one-line answer: They were innocent<\/em>.<\/p>\n

With the collapse <\/span>of the Soviet Union, rumors started trickling out of Russia: According to erstwhile KGB agents now speaking openly for the first time, Julius Rosenberg had in fact been a spy, and a valuable one. But Soviet intelligence operatives aren\u2019t anyone\u2019s idea of reliable sources, and it was easy for Robby and Michael to brush their claims aside.<\/p>\n

In July 1995, the U.S. government released a series of previously classified documents known as the Venona files. These decrypted Soviet communications from the 1940s told a similar story to that of the former KGB agents: Julius, along with Ruth and David Greenglass, had spied for the Soviet Union. The headlines crowed with the certainty of a fresh verdict: \u201cNEW EVIDENCE PROVES COUPLE WERE SPIES, OFFICIALS SAY<\/span>.\u201d<\/p>\n

To Robby and Michael, suddenly seeing their parents in the news again as spies<\/span> was painful. The whole thing felt like a disaster\u2014\u201clike a ton of bricks,\u201d as Robby put it to me. In a joint statement, they suggested that the NSA and the CIA had \u201ccooked\u201d the evidence to frame their parents. Venona, they insisted, changed none of their conclusions. One official release was not going to be enough to undo years of deep suspicion of the government.<\/p>\n

Still, Robby and Michael parsed the new evidence carefully. The files, they noticed, contained only one mention of Ethel: She was politically aligned with her husband and aware of his activities, the decrypted text said, but \u201cin view of delicate health does not work.\u201d This seemed like an important clue. If you interpreted \u201cwork\u201d to mean \u201cspy,\u201d as Robby and Michael did, that would suggest the damning typing story was pure invention on the Greenglasses\u2019 part.<\/p>\n

Slowly, more clues emerged. In 1999, a former KGB agent published a book revealing findings from Soviet archives that had briefly been opened a few years earlier. This, too, implicated Julius as a spy. Then, in a 2001 TV interview, David Greenglass (who had been living under an assumed name since he got out of prison and appeared on the program in disguise) admitted that he\u2019d lied on the stand when he said that Ethel had typed his notes. \u201cI don\u2019t know who typed it, frankly,\u201d he said. \u201cTo this day, I can\u2019t even remember that the typing took place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Greenglass did not express remorse for having sent his sister to her death, citing her \u201cstupidity\u201d for not cooperating with authorities. He said his conscience was clean. When the interviewer asked him what he would say to Robby and Michael, whom he had not seen since they were children, he replied, \u201cI\u2019m sorry that your parents are dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morton Sobell was <\/span>the one person who could definitively answer Robby and Michael\u2019s questions about their parents. He had been Julius\u2019s friend since they\u2019d met as engineering students at City College. He had stood trial with both Rosenbergs and, after getting out of prison in 1969, stayed in touch with Robby and Michael.<\/p>\n

For nearly six decades, Sobell maintained his innocence. But in 2008, at the age of 91, he told a reporter that, yes, he and Julius had turned over military secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II. If you wanted to call that spying, then sure, they\u2019d been spies. Ethel, he said, had known what Julius was doing. \u201cBut what was she guilty of? Of being Julius\u2019s wife.\u201d Robby and Michael felt as though, for the first time, a trusted source had stated it plainly: Julius was a spy, and Ethel was not.<\/p>\n

The brothers were shocked by Sobell\u2019s sudden admission. They had asked him again and again to tell them the truth about their parents, even if only in private. Why had he lied? Michael still thinks about this, he said: \u201cWhat if Morty had been honest with us?\u201d He could have spared them so many years of uncertainty.<\/p>\n

Even so, the brothers told me that finally learning the truth was a relief. They were in their 60s by then\u2014both grandfathers\u2014and had had more than a decade to consider the information in Venona. They now understood that their parents\u2019 prosecution hadn\u2019t been a senseless witch hunt, as they\u2019d once believed. Ethel and Julius hadn\u2019t been targeted randomly, or simply for having been Jewish Communists during the McCarthy era. And because Sobell himself had been the one to say it publicly, Robby and Michael wouldn\u2019t have to do the uncomfortable job of breaking the news to the remaining Rosenberg true believers, who still thought that any talk of spying was a government hoax.<\/p>\n

I was taken aback by their matter-of-factness. Was that really it? Could their ultimate reaction to learning that Julius had spied for the Soviet Union have been gratitude that they didn\u2019t have to be the messengers? I wanted to know how they felt about the actual spying\u2014about the fact that their father had shared highly classified information in order to aid another, later hostile, country\u2019s militarization, destroying their family in the process.<\/p>\n

When I pressed them on this, Michael and Robby conceded that perhaps Julius had been, as Robby put it, \u201ckind of a cowboy,\u201d prone to taking big risks without much concern for the effect they might have. Maybe, Michael suggested, a more responsible choice for a spy would have been to not have children at all. Nonetheless, they both remain sympathetic toward their father, and continue to argue that he was unfairly prosecuted. Even if Julius was a spy, they maintain, he was not an atomic <\/em>spy, and as such was not guilty of the charges for which he was executed.<\/p>\n

Julius seems to have approached his spying with a sprightly, if naive, enthusiasm. He was 24 and working as a junior engineer for the Army Signal Corps in New York when he was recruited by Russian agents in 1942, drawn to the promise of helping defeat Hitler and the notion, however fanciful, that the Soviet Union represented a solution to America\u2019s social ills. He went on to provide thousands of documents containing valuable military-industrial information, and became an active recruiter. His Soviet handler Alexander Feklisov recalled in his memoir that Julius could sometimes \u201cbe as carefree as a teenager,\u201d such as when he greeted the Russian during an early street-corner meeting with a hearty \u201cHello comrade!\u201d On another occasion, Feklisov wrote, Julius told him that, although he loved his wife and son (this was before Robby was born), his meetings with Feklisov were \u201camong the happiest moments of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike Julius, <\/span>Ethel was never given a code name in Venona, which Michael and Robby took to mean that she was not a spy. Why, then, should she have sacrificed herself, leaving her sons behind, particularly after Julius was executed and she was given one last chance to cooperate? Why did she choose death?<\/p>\n

The question nagged at me for months; no single explanation\u2014psychological, political, or otherwise\u2014felt completely satisfying. Part of me wanted to see Ethel as a victim, caught between her husband\u2019s recklessness, the vindictiveness of powerful men who didn\u2019t care whether she lived or died, and the fear that she was already too far down a path of deception to allow the world, let alone her sons, to learn the messy truth. I thought about the toll that years of what was essentially solitary confinement, as the only woman on death row, would take on anyone; it seemed likely that she was not, by the end, thinking rationally. But that way of looking at it denied Ethel agency. It was possible, of course, that she\u2019d made the choice to die of her own free will\u2014as a martyr for the Communist cause, to make the United States look bad, out of loyalty to Julius.<\/p>\n

When I raised the subject with Robby and Michael, they readily agreed that Ethel could have saved herself, had she wanted to. \u201cShe did have names,\u201d Robby said. \u201cIn fact, if she\u2019d given the names of Sarant and Barr\u201d\u2014Alfred Sarant and Joel Barr, members of the spy ring who had already defected to the Soviet Union\u2014\u201cnothing would have happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo should she have?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

Both brothers replied immediately and emphatically. \u201cOh no<\/em>,\u201d Michael said. \u201cI don\u2019t see why,\u201d Robby added. Making any choice other than the one she ultimately made, they argued, would have left Ethel with a permanent sense of guilt over turning on her husband and reversing her steadfast commitment to \u201csee this thing through\u201d\u2014the battle she\u2019d been waging, and the story of innocence she\u2019d been telling her sons and the world for three years.<\/p>\n

\u201cMom could\u2019ve said, I knew Julius was a spy; I helped him a little bit. I knew the names of two of the people he worked with. That\u2019s all I know; take it or leave it<\/em>,\u201d Michael said. \u201cThey would\u2019ve taken it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWho knows,\u201d Robby muttered, but Michael\u2019s counterfactual scenario seemed plausible enough to me, and I let him keep talking as he imagined what might have happened next.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe would have served some time in prison, and repudiated her marriage, and repudiated all the people who had supported them, and pulled the rug out from under Rob and me when they said that \u2018we were innocent.\u2019 And then shown up in our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

I knew he was trying to explain why this never would have worked. But even if their mother reappearing in their lives at a later date might have proved complicated, it was hard for me to believe that it would truly have been worse than not having her in their lives at all. \u201cWe might have grown up to hate her,\u201d Michael continued. He wasn\u2019t sure he could have forgiven her for turning on his father\u2014or for exposing the reality, while she was still alive, that both parents had lied to their sons. \u201cThe thought of her living that life was so horrible that I think it was easier to just follow him into the grave.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael seemed to be saying that by admitting her dishonesty, Ethel would have ruined their childhood and poisoned any prospect of a future relationship with her. But wouldn\u2019t some people see the fact that she\u2019d died for a story she knew was false\u2014something the brothers were acknowledging\u2014as a greater betrayal? Michael and Robby didn\u2019t seem willing to think about it that way. In their telling, Ethel had died, at least in part, to protect them.<\/p>\n

For the brothers to wish for any other outcome would be for them to wish for an entirely different life than the one they\u2019ve had and, against all odds, mostly enjoyed. It would be to wish that they\u2019d had a childhood with no Meeropols, and an adulthood with more secrecy, less purpose. Faced with something\u2014someone\u2014so ultimately unknowable, perhaps the best that anyone can do is decide on their own version of the truth and stick to it.<\/p>\n

I am not, <\/span>I realize, the first to raise these contradictions. The ghost of Ethel Rosenberg has haunted American life for decades, by turns exasperating and enthralling those\u2014psychiatrists, playwrights, novelists, scholars, journalists, relatives\u2014who have tried to wrap their arms around the meaning of her life and death.<\/p>\n

Few today would dispute that the government\u2019s case against Ethel was less than airtight. In 2015, after David Greenglass died, his 1950 grand-jury testimony was unsealed. \u201cI said before, and say it again, honestly, this is a fact: I never spoke to my sister about this at all,\u201d Greenglass had said. If that was true, then he had likely perjured himself when later, at trial, he gave the evidence that led to Ethel\u2019s conviction and sentencing. To some, Ethel\u2019s alleged encouragement of David\u2019s recruitment is evidence enough of her active role in the conspiracy<\/em> to commit espionage of which she was found guilty. But Robby and Michael argue that knowledge of a conspiracy is not the same as participation in it\u2014and that the prosecution failed to produce any proof she did participate, beyond what came directly from the Greenglasses\u2019 unreliable accounts.<\/p>\n

Whether or not you believe that the Rosenbergs deserved to die, there\u2019s no denying that the punishment they received was unusually severe. Harry Gold was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and got out of prison in time to work as a clinical chemist in a Philadelphia pathology lab before he died at 60. Ruth Greenglass confessed to being a courier at Los Alamos and never spent a single night in jail. And, indeed, the case against Ethel was especially thin.<\/p>\n

All of this ought, I think, to count for something in any honest assessment of the legal and ethical validity of the Rosenberg verdict. But I wasn\u2019t sure that the injustice of the whole affair was enough to explain, logically or morally, the clarion confidence of Ethel\u2019s claim that \u201cI was innocent, my husband was innocent, and neither of us knew anything about espionage.\u201d That was a lie.<\/p>\n

Last summer, I visited <\/span>Robby in western Massachusetts, where we sat in his sunny home office as his elderly gray cat threatened to knock over our water glasses. On the wall next to Robby\u2019s desk, I noticed a calendar from the Union of Concerned Scientists. The cartoon for that month showed a uniformed military official lounging coquettishly on a bed, phone in hand. The caption read: \u201cNo, you dismantle your nuclear arsenal first.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other walls displayed framed mementos from the Rosenberg Fund for Children, the nonprofit Robby started in 1990 that supports the children of progressive activists who have lost their livelihood, been discriminated against, faced prison time, or died as a result of their activism (my parents have been longtime supporters of the RFC). Pointing to the images in his office, Robby told me that the organization has allowed him to connect with hundreds of kids and teenagers who can relate to what he experienced. They have sometimes asked why he\u2019s not angrier. His response has always been that he considers his work to be a form of \u201cconstructive revenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy taste in vengeance is more intellectual than physical,\u201d Michael wrote in the \u201980s. Talking with him in the 2020s, I could see what he meant. Rather than cause for frustration, it seemed to be almost a source of comfort that there will always be another thread in the Rosenberg case to pull\u2014more documents to uncover, more verbal combat to undertake.<\/p>\n

Over the past decade, Robby and Michael have made a concerted push for Ethel\u2019s exoneration. In December 2016, the brothers again stood outside the White House, this time to deliver a petition asking President Obama to exonerate their mother in light of the newly released grand-jury testimony. They held a photograph of themselves there as boys, delivering the plea to Eisenhower that went unanswered. This one did, too.<\/p>\n

But a newly declassified document released toward the end of Joe Biden\u2019s presidency once again gave them hope. In September 2024, the brothers received a copy, via their lawyer, of a handwritten 1950 memo by Meredith Gardner, the chief Venona code breaker. If the Venona files represented Gardner\u2019s translated decryptions of the original Russian messages, this document, they believed, showed his own takeaways from those decryptions, and were thus a better reflection of the U.S. government\u2019s top-level findings. Gardner wrote, for example, that Ruth Greenglass was known \u201cto have been a Soviet agent.\u201d Just below that are his notes on Ethel:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

MRS. JULIUS ROSENBERG\u2014A message of 27 November 1944 stated that Mrs. Rosenberg was a party member, a devoted wife, and that she knew about her husbands work, but that due to ill health she did not engage in the work herself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Unlike the earlier releases, which stated only that Ethel did not work, this one specified that she did not engage in the<\/em> work\u2014the spying.<\/p>\n

To Michael and Robby, this was the smoking gun that they had spent 50 years hoping to find. The first time they read the memo, they told me, they high-fived; Michael cried. They called on the Biden administration to exonerate their mother. Again, they were disappointed.<\/p>\n

One virtue of <\/span>Julius and Ethel having been dead for nearly three-quarters of a century is that their sons will never have to confront them about what they now know; one difficulty is that they will never get to. This impossibility seems to act as a kind of buffer. They can shake their heads at their father\u2019s actions and tell themselves that their mother did the only thing she could, while reserving their deepest outrage for the one actor they still have the power to wrangle with: the United States government.<\/p>\n

On several occasions over the course of my reporting, Michael brought up the petition that he and Robby had tried to deliver to Obama in 2016. Still eager for a reply, Michael sent a letter to the Obama Foundation in Chicago in the spring of 2025, and then another\u2014by certified mail\u2014to the foundation\u2019s office in Washington, D.C. He never heard back.<\/p>\n

Recently, Michael told me that he had given up on trying to elicit a response from the former president. \u201cI thought it was a bigger deal than other people did,\u201d he admitted. Robby, for his part, told me he preferred to look forward, not back. He is 79 now; his brother is 83.<\/p>\n

But Robby didn\u2019t mean that he was ready to stop thinking about his parents\u2019 deaths or fighting for his mother\u2019s exoneration\u2014only that he didn\u2019t want to waste any more time on old strategies that hadn\u2019t panned out. The brothers are working with Representative Jim McGovern, Robby\u2019s congressman, who last year made a floor speech in the House about Ethel and has advocated for her exoneration. They\u2019d love to see a major Hollywood movie about their mother, they said, to reignite public interest in the case.<\/p>\n

Listening to them, I thought about the train tracks Michael had drawn as a kid, endlessly looping back on themselves. Where, if anywhere, might these latest efforts lead? In some ways, the brothers have gotten much further in their quest than they ever anticipated they would; their deep satisfaction at the 2024 release of the Gardner memo came not just from its contents, but also from the somewhat improbable fact that they lived to see it, after 50 years of requests and lawsuits and petitions. It had given them a sense of forward motion, and a measure of vindication late in their lives. They knew far more than they once had. How could they stop now?<\/p>\n

This article appears in the <\/small><\/em>August 2026<\/small><\/em> print edition with the headline \u201cThe Rosenberg Boys.\u201d<\/small><\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Madonna Is Finally Giving the World What It Wants<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed by the U.S. government, they left behind two sons, ages 6 and 10. 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